Introduction
Recently, with the advent of the Web 2.0 era, an increasing number of people have participated online via social networking platforms for interaction, such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. These platforms have permeated the social fabric of daily life, and have profoundly changed the way people communicate. Therefore, many traditional communities and organizations use social media as their preferred communicative platforms to engage with their audience and convey their values.
In this report, we chose the advocacy organization, ‘Australian Marriage Equality’, to conduct our research and investigate how this community communicates with people internally and externally. We focused on this community because legalizing same-sex marriage has become an important political issue in Australia, especially after many other countries have successively legalized marriage equality. Based on this controversial issue, and the diversity of its participants, we consider it as a good example to help better understand communicative ecology.
In order to map the communicative ecology of this community, this article investigates various ways of its communication, such as campaigns, political activities and celebrity supporters. Moreover, by drawing the communicative map, we analyze whether these online platforms and media of this community play efficient roles to communicate with their audience.
To analyze the network data, we used Simply Measured (http://simplymeasured.com/#sm.000010rcsx2gibd97pxl6m15auj17), an online social network analysis (SNA) tool, to obtain a detailed overview of a two-week period. This analysis includes popular keywords within comments, popular posts by total engagement, popular interactive domains, and user behavior.
Background
Ongoing social debates on the legality of homosexuality have existed for decades. Since the first law to legalize same-sex marriages was passed in the Netherlands in 2001, marriage equality has become a universal concern. Statistics show that same-sex marriage has become the fourth most important issue to voters aging from 18 to 25 (Clay 2013, para.8). However, the issue of equality in marriage is not important enough to decide the votes. While it is known that the government is now working to enhance active citizenship in Australia, especially of the young generation’s participation in politics, the increased debate on marriage equality in the polls indicates to growing attention in the political context.
The Australian Marriage Equality (AME) Organization is an organization founded in 2004 as an advocacy group, with the union of volunteers committed to achieving legal recognition of same-sex marriages nationwide. AME cooperated with Getup! on the Valentine’s Day in 2011 to launch a campaign aiming to raise the awareness of the public about the critical role of marriage playing in the community of gay and lesbians. Polls were conducted and literature were published. With the activities AME have hosted and the efforts AME has been putting into the issue, AME has successfully drawn people’s attention to marriage equality in Australia, not only in the publics but also commercial and crucially, politics. As is addressed in the website, with AME’s lobbying, making same-sex marriage equal to heterosexual marriage has ‘gone from the impossible to the inevitable’ (Australianmarriageequality.org, 2004).
Mapping & Description
Communicative platforms
Australian Marriage Equality (AME)’s primary motive is to legalize the belief that the rights and responsibilities of marriage should not be affected by their gender, and sexuality under Australian marriage law (Home, 2015). To achieve this, AME uses several mediums and new media platforms for lobbying, advocacy and education. AME has an official website which provides general information, and utilises many social network platforms including Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube. In addition, AME also communicates through traditional media, such as ABC News and SBS, with curated media releases.
Ethnographical investigation
AME’s online community is largely concentrated on their Facebook and Twitter: 136.4K liked and 11.9K followers respectively. Almost every post has seen a response in either comments or likes/favs. Although they have Google+, Instagram and Youtube as well, there is not much engagement on these platforms. Therefore, this investigation is primarily focused on their Facebook page and their Twitter account.
AME’s audience can include any gender and age group, male, female and transgender, young or old people. No matter who you are, what your sexuality is, anyone who supports the idea of marriage equality can interact with each other on this online community. For example, on Facebook, Philip Nicholls is an active commentator who is a bisexual male and around 50 years old. He stated that ‘bisexuals are no different to Gays and Straight people… we are bisexual and damn proud of it’. In another example, Erin McCallum is a married straight woman who changed her profile picture to support AME. There are many organizations involved such as Getup!, Australian Pride Network and Same Same community, and they promote and support each other on multiple online social platforms.
Figure 1: A snapshot of some organizations and communities that support AME, sourced from their website. Viewed 14th May, 2016.
From our observations, almost all participation in the AME community is focused on Australia. The most engaged posts or tweets are all related to recent activities within, or stories around Australia, and the most popular or interactive posts concerned the movements of Australian marriage equality. For instance, on Facebook, the top three engagement posts through the last two weeks were of a politician supporting marriage equality, and two posts were of the 2016 Budget in relation to Australian marriage equality (Figure 3). Furthermore, Alexa.com data estimates a 57.4% of all website visitors as being from Australia. Therefore, the geographical distribution of AME’s audience is primarily Australian.
Figure 2: Top Three Posts (SNA result from Simply Measured)
Digital and Non-Digital Engagement
Figure 3: Overview of AME’s Facebook page 18th 4-12th May, 2016
AME’s online engagement is primarily limited to its SNS accounts. However, the level and depth of the engagement differs per platform. AME’s Twitter account consists of broadcasting messages; tweets made in reply between 2016-05-01 and 2016-05-14 were words of gratitude to positive tweets directed at the AME’s Twitter account (@AMEQUALITY 2016). Their Facebook page sees a consistent stream of activity, and acts as their main online communication hub. AME’s Twitter content mirrors their Facebook posts, but there is much less community feedback on Twitter (in either likes, retweets, or replies).
These SNS accounts have not been observed to be moderated by AME staff. Widely speaking, most of AME’s engagement with its community consist of positive feedback. Open debate is rare, and dissenting is even rarer or nonexistent. AME’s website does not allow for comments or discussion, which further reinforces the superficial interaction between the organization and their online community.
AME’s offline engagement is best characterized by their status as a non-profit organization (see Child & Gronbjerg 2007). Outside of a core team of staff, AME’s internal structure is comprised of temporary volunteers that are recruited both online and offline. These volunteers are responsible for community-run events, and assist with the organization’s official activities in various capacities.
Given the social and interpersonal nature of AME’s core goal, most of AME’s focus is on offline engagement. Campaigning for marriage equality in local districts, taking polls, lobbying local representatives, and engaging with the pro-marriage equality community in non-formal & formal events comprise most of AME’s activities, as evidenced through their Facebook photos and announcements on their website. Volunteers act as moderators and as temporary representatives of the organization during community-organized events. Sponsored events are overseen by AME staff, and political campaign events draw a mix of both staff and volunteers due to increased media visibility.
Communicative Ecology Map
Based on the above investigation and analysis, we have drowned the communicative ecology map of AME (Figure 4).
Figure 4: Communicative Ecology Map
Discussion
According to our ecology map, AME communicates on social platforms like Facebook and Twitter to attract fans and acquires numbers of supporters. AME makes extensive use of social platforms and interacts with its users. From mapping, it shows that AME has done an excellent work on updating information related to the Australian marriage status and keeping active to its audiences almost every day. Furthermore, looking at the follower count shows a great difference between how the community treats Facebook and Twitter. This can be seen as a demonstration of the two platforms’ differences: Facebook focuses on friends while Twitter encourages followers, and Facebook users are subject to peer pressure while Twitter only focuses on the profile design (Tagtmeier, 2010). Facebook is also more popular with connected young people, whilst Twitter affords a conversational social communication with strangers. Therefore, Facebook is easier to achieve an engaged audience. The communicative ecology is a system which connects different people, activities, events, media and relationship together, not only an independent person or thing, but also some impacts on something (Tacchi, Slater & Hearn 2003, pp. 15).
The benefits of AME using Twitter is much less obvious. The ‘strategic and support messages’ two-dimensional model proposed by Guo & Saxton (2014, pp. 73-74) can be applied here, where advocacy groups focus on messaging strategic messages (to shareholders) and support messages (to its community). AME’s tweets are by and large support messages, with the effect of retaining existing supporters to the exclusion of deniers and potential participants.
Based on our investigation, in the internal communication, the communicative ecology of AME community is beneficial for users to better understand the organization of social activities, the environment got experience and the implication of organization (Hearn & Foth 2007, p.1-2). AME community uses several digital online platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to provide updated information frequently, moreover, it post photos and videos about community activities to encourage users to participate in. In addition, the interactions between users and community are frequently because the community replied the engaged comments constantly, it makes the environment active.
Community platforms provide rich communication in social networking. The main feature of future community platforms should be interoperability, and more attention should be concerned on interoperability (Koch 2002, p1). Baym’s concept of networked collectivism (2013, pp. 86) should also be applied here, as AME’s audience as distributed online have a clear identity centered around a political issue, but lack the sense of place, leading to a lack of community contributions online (in stark contrast to AME’s activities offline).
A potential solution is for AME to engage in wider educational efforts to increase awareness and attract more audiences. For example, AME can advertise and tweet more active and exiting things like the Mardi Gras, a festival celebrating same-sex relationships which garners heavy media coverage every year. Such participation will make AME members more confident and attract more young people to join their cause.
Conclusion
AME is a diverse community gathered under a shared interest, and its communicative ecology reflects the disparate parties through loose, often one-way relationships. AME’s nature as an advocacy group is to be a mouthpiece for a cause, and that limits its communication practices when compared to intimate fan communities or hobbyist groups.
Despite, and perhaps owing to that fact, AME’s communicative practices leave much to be desired. There is no full list of sponsors on AME’s self-run website, and AME’s offline influence has had to be pieced together from indirect sources, such as supporter tweets and recruitment listings. The vast geographical scale of AME’s reach further imposes on the notion of a thorough record of AME’s activities.
However, these slights have done little to impede on AME’s popularity and evident success, lending to the idea that advocacy groups and their communities are more commonly identified by the cause they support, than themselves.
References
- @AMEQUALITY 2016, Twitter, <https://twitter.com/AMEQUALITY/status/727628163262472192>.
- @AMEQUALITY 2016, Twitter, https://twitter.com/AMEQUALITY/status/728400123114323969>.
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- Alexa 2016, viewed 19 May, 2016, <http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/australianmarriageequality.org>.
- Australian Marriage Equality. Org 2004,Resources: About us, viewed 18 May 2016, <http://www.australianmarriageequality.org/about/>.
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Mapping AME 